The Soul of Surfing: Hand-Shaped Boards in a Factory-Built World

Share

The Soul of Surfing: Hand-Shaped Boards in a Factory-Built World

Sunset Shapers owner James Mitchell shapes a custom board at the San Francisco shop.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

James Mitchell takes his electric planer from the shelf and, with skill that comes only from years of experience, sets to work shaping a slab of polyurethane. He shaves a millimeter here, a millimeter there, periodically running his hand over the surface to check his progress. It's more art than science, done largely by eye and by feel. Satisfied that he's got the right shape, Mitchell takes out a hand planer and repeats the process. Then he takes out a sanding block, and repeats the process.

This takes a couple of hours. Once he's happy with the surface of the board – slightly concave on top and convex on the bottom, with a bow from front to back – Mitchell takes out a saw, a pencil and two templates cut from wood. He uses these to finalize the board, cutting the slab into the shape we all associate with a surfboard. Once done, the board, a mini-gun designed for the large pounding waves found at San Francisco's Ocean Beach, is ready for fiberglassing.

"It's more artistry. It's more of a craft. You get an idea in your mind's eye and then be able to create it by hand is a lot more fulfilling. I can scrub out 10 CNC boards and it's never as satisfying as one really good hand shape," Mitchell says.

Mitchell makes precision marks by hand.

Shaping a board is a painstaking process, and it can take a guy like Mitchell six to eight hours to craft a single board. Meanwhile, a factory in Asia can use a CNC machine to turn out a board in minutes, and repeat the process hundreds of times a day. Those boards are, in many ways, the same as the boards Mitchell has been making since opening his shop in 2010.

But they're also completely different. They're a commodity.

For many people, surfing is more than a sport, it's a spiritual experience. It's also a sport defined by community, the "locals only" mentality that not only defines territory, but the friendships between a surfer and the guy who made the board he rides. Your shaper knows where and how you surf and what you're strengths and weaknesses are, and uses that knowledge to build the best board for you. This relationship is, for some people, so important that legendary shaper Gary Linden says, "If I didn't shape, the best shaper I knew would be my best friend."

These days, however, a board can be ordered online as easily as socks and made to order like pizza. The speed and ease of large-scale manufacturing, compounded with the shortage of boards caused by the sports' growing popularity, has factory-built boards from overseas pushing local shapers out of a lot of surf shops.

In 2010, only 63 percent of surfboards sold in the United States were made there, down from 74 percent in 2004. And while the stats from Surf Industry Manufactures Association don't note whether a surfboard was made by a man or a machine, most of these imported boards are factory made.

This is a sea change. Surfboards have long been made by hand. The first of them were made of wood. Bob Simmons started experimenting with polyurethane, which was cheaper and easier to use, after World War II. Shapers Whitey Harrison and Hobie Alter refined the process through the 1950s. By the 1960s, polyurethane was the standard. Almost every board in existence starts as a slab, known as a blank, of the stuff, which is covered with fiberglass after shaping.

Thanks to CNC machines, drafting software, new materials, and rising demand for inexpensive boards, more boards are being made in factories overseas. This started in earnest when Clark Foam, until then leading supplier of blanks, shut down suddenly in 2005. With the supply of polyurethane blanks severely curtailed, unconventional materials like epoxy and expanded polystyrene came into vogue.

As with an mass-produced product, quality varied. While companies like Firewire strive to create high-quality boards based on the designs by guys like Gary Linden and Daniel "Tomo" Thompson, others fill the market with throwaway boards.

Factory-built boards are at odds with the romantic notion of riding boards shaped by craftsmen drawn to the craft by their love of surfing, not money. A blank costs about $100; having it glassed can cost $400. Given that most boards sell for six hundred bucks or so, it isn't hard to see no one's getting rich shaping surfboards.

Mitchell, sanding down a custom board.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Danny Hess, at his shop in 2012.

Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

"Shapers don't make surfboards to get rich, they do it because they love it," says San Francisco shaper Danny Hess.

In many cases, a friendship develops between a surfer and a shaper, who in many cases deliver something better than the surfer wanted. Such was the case when local San Francisco surfer Ian Wallace asked Lyle Carlson to replicate the 11-foot big-wave board he'd snapped. Carlson decided Wallace would be better off with a board 11 feet, 6 inches tall and, without even talking to Wallace about it, built one.

"It turned out to be the best board ever," Wallace said. "Sometimes the board you need is not the board you asked for."

It's the loss of relationship that's troubling when it comes to factory built boards. Surfing is built upon relationships, which form a community. Purists will tell you that by removing craftsmen from that community, surfing loses some of its heart.

One company trying to balance the line between creating a high-quality factory board and still giving surfers a customized experience is Firewire.

The company, which has been around since 2005, started with factories in California and Australia, but moved to Thailand in 2007. Firewire uses expanded polystyrene, which is lighter, tougher, and better for the environment. And because they're designed with CAD and made with CNC machines, every board is identical.

"We’ve created a technology that’s created an opportunity for someone to buy a surfboard that has very little variances in the design," Chuy Reyna of Firewire told Wired.

Firewire offers boards designed by a pair of well-known shapers, Tomo (Daniel Thomson) and Gary Linden. And they're ridden by pros like Bruce Campbell, Noah Erikson, Casey Grant and teen-age wunderkind Sebastian Williams. Pros appreciate the cookie-cutter approach because they can quickly and easily get an exact copy of their favorite board when it inevitably snaps – which is important when you consider top-level pros might go through 150 boards a year.

With more boards being imported from foreign firms who employ people who may have never surfed, many surfers are decrying the commoditization of the sport. Reyna realizes not everyone is keen on a surfboard shaped by machines, but says the technology offers distinct advantages.

"We're not a surfboard for everybody," he says. "If you're serious about equipment, you'll notice variables in a hand-shaped surfboard. At the end of the day, if you're competing or just want to replace the board you're in love with, Firewire is the place where you can get it done."

While Linden and other shapers see factory boards as a natural evolution of the sport, one born of the global economy and rising popularity of surfing, they aren't terribly worried about losing their jobs. Factory boards are great for beginners, or pros who need a steady supply of bespoke boards. But stick with the sport long enough, they say, and eventually you'll want a custom board.

"People hunger for and have an appreciation for something that's not mass produced," Hess said.

A few shapers, like Thomas Meyerhoffer, are embracing the factory approach and using it to craft personalized boards.

Meyerhoffer helped design the original iMac and the Flow step-in snowboard binding system. After leaving Apple, he began to focus on surfing. He's particularly interested in longboards which, due to their size (typically 8 feet or longer), are harder to make than short boards. His design features a concave edge – a radical departure for longboards – that was designed by computer and shaped with a CNC machine.

"The computer for me is as much as of a tool as any other tool to get to where you want to be as a shaper," Meyerhoffer says. He went through 40 prototypes while designing his longboard, something that would have been difficult to impossible with conventional hand shaping. The planer and saw are great tools for hacking off unwanted bits of foam, he says, but nothing beats a CNC machine for efficiency and consistency.

Dewey Weber is another shaper embracing the future without surrendering the past. He uses a CNC machine to do the rough work, then finishes his boards by hand.

And while sawing and shaving of a board are being done by a machine, Weber knows the human element is what matters, "The computer couldn't do squat without that shaper. It's just a tool. It's basically taking your planer and your saw, your grunt tools and putting it into this milling machine."